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Google Analytics: What the Heck Is This Anyway?

Posted by Kara Wilson on 14 June 2018 | 0 Comments

Would you feel comfortable running your company without any accounting? Probably not! Similarly, you shouldn’t be running a website without being able to track how well it’s doing. Google Analytics is like a profit and loss statement for your website; it can help you measure the success of your website by tracking and reporting website traffic.

The amount of data that Google tracks can be broken down in many ways within this interface, and can help you interpret how visitors interact with your online presence. In addition to the tracking of website visitors, it provides you with important information, numbers, and statistics that you need to maximize your website’s performance. The best part? It’s free.

Here are a few important questions that Google Analytics can answer for you:

How many people visit my website?

How do my website visitors find me?

Which pages on my website are the most popular?

Which of my blogs do people like the most?

How many visitors become leads or customers?

Google Analytics really is a vast tool, but it does come with a few standard reports. These can be really helpful for novice and experienced users alike.

Audience Reports:

This is where you can find demographic data and behavior patterns. You can get as detailed as you want about the age, gender, location, and interests of the people who visit your site. Additionally, you can see how often they visit and what type of devices they’re using to view it.

This can help you identify if your website is appealing to and attracting the type of person that matches your ideal client.

Acquisition Reports:

Everything you ever wanted to know about how people are getting to your website can be found here, including traffic that is generated through social media.

If you connect Google Analytics to Adwords, it will also provide additional insight on what your cost per click advertising is doing, and what may or may not be working for you with your SEO.

Behavior Reports:

Do you have a lot of content? This is where you can identify what your top pages are on your website, or what blog articles are most popular. If you have a search bar on your website, you can also find out what terms people are searching for within your website, or you can learn how fast your website loads. Google will make some suggestions on how you can make your website load faster, as well. A faster loading website keeps more people on your website for longer periods of time, helping create more new clients for you.

Conversions:

You can set up Goals within Google Analytics that track things like website form submissions, or people that click to call your phone number. You can see the path that a visitor followed to get to your contact submission here, and learn how leads that convert to clients think so that you can get more of them. This can help you identify how many leads are coming to you from your website, and what actions that they took to get there. It’s a very powerful way to track the ROI of your efforts online.

Pretty awesome stuff, isn’t it?

Ultimately, these reporting tools give you the data that you need to help you attract the right client and funnel them into contacting you, and increase your overall lead volume that is coming from your website.

Now, this is a pretty high level overview of some of the basic capabilities of Google Analytics, and why you should be paying attention to it. Want to learn more? Check out the Google Analytics Academy, which has courses from Advanced to Expert, also free! It’s a great, powerful, free tool to be using to improve your business and marketing efforts.